TROY SENIK: Trump offers voters attitudes, not ideas

I watched this year’s first Republican presidential debate with a handful of seasoned observers of GOP politics. Each one of them walked away feeling better – feeling that the fever that was Donald Trump’s popularity among a certain segment of Republican voters would finally begin to break.

How could it not? They had watched the billionaire refuse to rule out running as a third-party candidate. They had seen him grow belligerent with Megyn Kelly, the sweetheart of Fox News viewers. They had witnessed him use a forum ostensibly dedicated to picking a presidential nominee to boast about how he had mastered the art of buying off politicians. Executed by any other Republican candidate, it would have amounted to a political suicide attempt.

And then … nothing happened. At least nothing much. A national CNN/ORC poll released Tuesday shows Trump, at 24 percent, continuing to hold a healthy lead over each of his rivals (Jeb Bush, at 13 percent, is in second place). According to Fox News polling, whatever drop in support Trump has suffered since the debate amounts to a rounding error. The Donald did nothing to tone things down – and he didn’t suffer for it in the slightest.

Now, an important caveat applies: Trump owes his lead, in part, to the fact that the allegiance of those who aren’t supporting him is divided among 16 other candidates. And there’s a definite ceiling on his support, with around 60 percent of Republican voters telling pollsters they have an unfavorable view of the brash billionaire.

But how do you account for the fact that some 42 percent of Republicans (the combined total of those who ranked Trump as either their first or second choice in the CNN poll) seem willing to continue supporting the candidate despite revelations that on a wide array of issues – taxes, abortion, guns, health care, and, yes, even immigration – his past comments put him in the company of liberal Democrats?

Well, here’s a thought: Maybe they don’t care. Maybe they don’t actually worry about the substance of a candidate’s positions or his vision for the country. Maybe there’s a cohort of Republican voters out there that just wants to break windows for the thrill they get when they hear rock meet glass.

If you had floated this theory to someone before the election, it would’ve seemed absurd. But we’ve never really had the right set of circumstances to expose this impulse before. No previous candidate had the combination of money, charisma, and the utter lack of shame necessary to run this experiment.

What Trump offers these voters is not a set of ideas; it’s a set of attitudes. It’s the notion that confidence is its own kind of competence. It’s the idea that apologizing is a far graver sin than being wrong or tactless. It’s the concept that the world’s a nasty place and that the only way to get ahead is by being nastier than everybody else. Donald Trump may be the first man to run for president on Nietzsche’s “will to power.”

This trend is plain to see if you force yourself to read the transcripts (you’ll need about nine Advil) of Trump’s mostly substance-free interviews. America, by his telling, is reeling primarily because our leaders are “stupid” or not tough enough. It’s not about ideas or principles. It’s an entirely amoral argument about willpower and force, the only language the candidate is capable of speaking.

Here’s what ought to give Republican leaders pause: if Trump’s truculence is so central to his appeal that it renders his actual policy views mostly irrelevant to supporters, then these polling numbers aren’t going to change anytime soon. And with his opposition fractured, that means Trump is going to remain all alone at the top for some time to come. This fever, in other words, is just getting started.

WRITE A LETTER TO THE EDITOR:
Letters to the Editor: E-mail to letters@pe.com.
Please provide your name, city and telephone number (telephone numbers will not be published).
Letters of about 200 words will be given preference. Letters will be edited for length, grammar and clarity.

Join the conversation

We invite you to use our commenting platform to engage in insightful
conversations about issues in our community. Although we do not pre-screen comments,
we reserve the right at all times to remove any information or materials that are unlawful,
threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, indecent
or otherwise objectionable to us, and to disclose any information necessary to satisfy the law,
regulation, or government request. We might permanently block any user who abuses these conditions.